LONDON -- Intel Corp. announced the availability of its "Rosedale" WiMAX broadband interface device late on Monday, two days before Fujitsu and Wi-Lan Ltd. roll out their own WiMAX chip in Las Vegas.

The two announcements are important steps toward making the WiMAX technology a reality. However, some attendees here at the WiMAX and Broadband Access Conference here began sounding a note of caution concerning the business models surrounding the technology.

Intel's Rosedale WiMAX chip, officially dubbed the Intel PRO/Wireless 5116, will be built into the first generation of "fixed" 802.16d CPE equipment that will be attached to the outsides of buildings. Service providers are expected to use WiMAX as a wireless backhaul, leaving the more established wired Ethernet or WiFi protocols to carry the bits directly to a user's PC.

About fifteen service providers announced support for the Rosedale chip, with almost all of them deploying at least a few base stations in rural or metropolitan areas to create "hotzones" in cities including Dublin, Ireland; Taipei, Taiwan; Madrid, Spain; and Bristol, England.

"It's a very good sampling," said Scott Richardson, general manager for broadband wireless at Intel, at the technology's official European launch. "My list counts up to 100 trials in the pipeline for fixed WiMAX all exploring some level of solution."

A spokesman for Fujitsu Ltd., however, indicated that the Wi-Lan and Fujitsu partnership will announce their own chip at a wireless conference beginning this Thursday in Las Vegas. The spokesman declined to offer details of the chip in advance of the launch, but characterized it as "real silicon".

Although the Rosedale chipset was rolled out here to a friendly reception of existing customers and partners, European carriers attending the The Wireless LAN Event over the next two days will also hear presentations on two alternatives to WiMAX: HSDPA, the evolution of the W-CDMA standard, and 802.11n, the next-generation version of the popular 802.11 standard. The two alternatives are expected to offer at least megabit data rates, and cover up to dozens of kilometers, although mesh networks may have to be used.

Moreover, the technology is also being examined in a new light after the failure of Mesh Broadband, a U.K. WISP that tried to serve rural areas in the U.K. with a mesh network. Although the company was funded with about 400,000 pounds of government funding, the company ceased trading last week, which Jim Baker, chief executive of Telabria Networks, saw as evidence of a poor assessment of the business environment.

One of the reasons that the WiMAX technology is being closely watched in the U.K. is due to the slow deregulation of DSL services from lines originally owned by British Telecom, Although cable providers like Telewest and NTL are wiring regions with high-speed cable, many other regions are still served by ADSL, using the BT local loops. Speeds of 512 Kbits/s are marketed as "broadband". In the U.S., meanwhile, Intel chairman Craig Barrett has derided 1-Mbit speeds as "not broadband".

According to Richardson, however, initial WiMAX deployments will not be pitched as a high-speed alternative to DSL. "Initial deployments will be megabit services," he said. "They will compete on DSL on flexibility, not on the other elements of services."

Baker, however, warned WiMAX providers to avoid being trapped by existing wired services. "You shouldn't extend their antenna anywhere you can not make money, and this is where Mesh Broadband went wrong," he said.

Attendees were also split over the issue of the wireless spectrum, which, like Swiss cheese, is full of holes. The European Union has allocated spectrum frequencies of 3.4- to 3.6-GHz for the WiMAX standard. The U.S, meanwhile, has assigned the 2.5- to 2.7-GHz range, in addition to the 3.65- to 3.7-GHz range. In Korea, the WiBro camp has used a 2.3- to 2.4-GHz bandwidth, and China has assigned the 3.3- to 3.4-GHz band to the technology.

On Tuesday, however, all of the Korean providers involved in their own proprietary version of WiMAX, called "WiBro," said they had joined the WiMAX Forum, which oversees the direction of the technology. The expectation is joining the Forum will help reconcile the standards, attendees said. The WiMAX Forum will begin certifying products for interoperability this summer.

To create equipment that could be used in both countries, equipment manufacturers will have to transmit in the so-called "unlicensed" spectrum, which may or may not be prohibited by individual governments. While this might not be an issue with the first-generation "fixed" WiMAX antennas that will be mounted to buildings, the technology could pose problems in late 2006 and 2007, when the second generation of more mobile WiMAX components will roll out.

In that case, it's possible that a business model akin to 3G services will arise, according to Matt Pope, vice president of sales and marketing for radio maker Sierra Monolithics. Incompatible networks could exist side by side. "It's worked for GSM," he said.

On the other hand, WiMAX supporters praised the technology. In South Africa, for example, Thami Msimango oversees a culture split between what he calls a "First World" society of cable, DSL, and relative prosperity and a rural "Third World" of farms and rural areas. Msimango, managing director of network infrastructure provisioning for Telkom SA Ltd., the country's largest carrier, said that he has deployed five base stations in a two-phase deployment through October and November, using equipment provided by Alvarion, a key partner of Intel. Msimango said he's also examining competing chips from Fujitsu and others.

Likewise, Spanish carrier Iberbanda has deployed 300 base stations across Catalonia, Madrid, Navarra, and Andalucia, according to Carlos Morell, the company's chief executive, in an interview. "In the past, wireless has been characterized by broken promises," he said. "This is not a promise, this is a commitment."

So far, the existing number of Rosedale chipsets has been matched by an equivalent number of radios, Sierra's Pope said. Proxim showed off its initial CPE design housing the Rosedale's printed-circuit board in a white aluminum box about the dimensions of a baseball base. A derivative design will mount the antenna directly on the box, according to Holger Steinbach, senior program manager for WAN research and development at Proxim.

The initial Rosedale chipset consumes about 2 watts of power, according to Laurie Kasper, the product marketing engineer for Intel responsible for the Rosedale chipset. She denied that the chipset was designed only for the spectrum used by the North American market, a claim raised by Magnus Kelly, managing director of Mapesbury Communications and a speaker at the conference. "That's not true," she said. "It just works."

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